Thursday, April 20, 2017

Trump's America: Erie County, Pennsylvania

While blacks and Hispanics without college degrees are also falling behind economically and socially, middle-age mortality has worsened for whites in particular over the past 20 years—a fact some attribute partly to social context.
“For whites, their reference group is previous generations of whites,” said Shannon Monnat, a Pennsylvania State University professor who studies the opioid epidemic in rural America. “When they look back on their parents and grandparents, it feels like their generation is doing worse.”

Source: Wikipedia

From the same article:

Such decline runs deep in Erie, where Johnson attended school and worked a string of part-time restaurant jobs. Nestled against the gray-green waters of one of America’s Great Lakes, the town has been declining since the 1970s. Its population dropped below 100,000 in 2014 for the first time since 1920. (2016 U.S. Census estimate puts it back above 100,000.)